Buyer’s guide
The tool vendors say no professional services required, and sometimes they are right. The five-part test, the cases where it fails, and the middle option nobody advertises.
By Alex Makey · 3 September 2026 · 7 min read
Migration tool vendors say it plainly: no local installations, no professional services needed, no certifications required. Sometimes they are right, and a partner who pretends otherwise is selling you something you do not need.
Here is the honest test.
A tool is enough when all five of these are true:
One. Under about a hundred mailboxes, and no personal archives above 100 GB.
Two. Permissions are clean. SharePoint inherits properly, nobody has set unique permissions on individual files, and you know who owns every site.
Three. Identity is simple. Cloud-only, or one directory synchronisation you understand, and no Conditional Access policies that need rebuilding.
Four. Nothing is under litigation hold or a retention policy, and no regulator will ask you to produce anything from the source estate.
Five. You have an internal administrator with time. Not someone who will fit it around their day job — the tool automates the moves, not the decisions, and the decisions are most of the work.
If all five hold, buy the tool. It will cost a fraction of an engagement and it will probably work.
The fifth condition, usually. The tool moves mailboxes. It does not decide which duplicate identities merge, and it will not rebuild the Power Automate flows bound to the old tenant — that is development work, scoped separately. It does not decide, what the target SharePoint structure should be, which anonymous sharing links get recreated, or what happens to the mailbox of someone who left in 2021. Those decisions take longer than the migration and they cannot be automated.
Merging rather than moving. Tools handle a move from A to B. A consolidation of three tenants into one, with overlapping people and colliding domains, is a sequencing problem before it is a data problem. A custom domain can only be attached to one tenant at a time, which is a scheduling constraint no tool resolves for you.
The failure case. This is the one that changes the maths. When a migration pass fails after cutover, mail duplicates in mailboxes that are already live. Bulk clean-up used to be feasible at 10,000 objects per pass; it is no longer available at that scale. A tool licence does not include somebody who has unpicked that before.
Anything with a deadline attached to a deal. A transitional service agreement expiry is a legal date. If it slips, the consequence is contractual rather than technical, and that risk usually costs more than the engagement.
You do not have to choose between a licence and a full engagement.
Buy the assessment only. Two weeks of discovery: the inventory, the mailbox size distribution, the permission and external sharing report, the dependency register, and a written sequence with the constraints stated. Then run it yourself with your own tool.
You get the part that needs experience — knowing what to look for and what order to do it in — without paying for the part your administrator can do. Most partners will sell this. Fewer advertise it, because the full engagement is worth more to them.
We will. If discovery shows your estate is genuinely simple, we will say so, and the honest answer costs us the larger project.
Their tools are good. MigrationWiz, ShareGate, AvePoint, CloudFuze and the rest do what they say — we have compared them by name, and any competent partner uses them rather than building something. When a partner implies the tooling is proprietary magic, be sceptical — you are usually paying for the same product with a markup.
The right question is not “whose tool”. It is who owns the outcome when the tool hits something it cannot handle, which on any estate of size it eventually will.
A tool licence has no opinion about your permission model, no view on which archives are worth moving, and nobody to call at 11pm on cutover Saturday. Those are the three things that make migrations expensive, and none of them are features.
Pull two reports before you talk to anyone: a mailbox size list sorted descending, and a list of SharePoint sites with their owners.
If the top of the first report is boring and the second column of the second report is populated, you probably need a tool. If the first report has a long tail of enormous archives, or the owner column is mostly blank, you need somebody who has seen that before — because both mean the estate contains things nobody currently understands.
One email a month, at most
Postmortems, timelines, licensing changes that cost people money. No newsletter cadence, no digest of other people’s news. If a month has nothing worth your time, you hear nothing.
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Related questions
A tool is usually enough under about a hundred mailboxes with clean permissions, simple identity, no legal holds, and an internal administrator with actual time. It stops being enough when tenants are being merged rather than moved, when there is a deal deadline, or when nobody can explain parts of the estate.
It does not decide which duplicate identities merge, what the target SharePoint structure should be, which sharing links to recreate, or what to do when a pass fails after cutover and duplicates mail in live mailboxes. The decisions take longer than the moves.
Yes, and it is often the right answer. Two weeks of discovery produces the inventory, mailbox size distribution, permission report, dependency register and a written sequence. You then execute it with your own tool and administrator.
Rarely, and be sceptical when they imply otherwise. Competent partners use MigrationWiz, ShareGate, AvePoint or similar and add their own automation for the edge cases. What you are buying is ownership of the outcome, not the software.
Pull a mailbox size list sorted descending and a list of SharePoint sites with their owners. A boring top of the first list and a populated owner column on the second means a tool will probably do. A long tail of very large archives or a blank owner column means the estate contains things nobody understands.
Scoping costs nothing
We will answer them about our own work, in writing, with the numbers. If the answers do not convince you, they should at least make the next partner’s answers easier to judge.